The Night That Changed Everything (18 page)

Russ and Tom's laughter is interrupted by Avril grabbing her coat. ‘As stimulating as this is, I've got a recital to attend.'

Russ slings his hands to his chest like he's devastated. ‘You're leaving?'

Avril acts like she hasn't heard him and leans her cheek into Tom so he can kiss it. Once she's gone Russ tells us about his latest date.

‘The first thing she said was,
I hoped you'd be taller
.'

Jamie cracks up. ‘Had you not met her before?'

‘He meets them online,' I answer for him.

Russ puffs his lips. ‘It's an expensive game.'

‘Avril was very particular about splitting everything when we starting dating,' says Tom, and the rest of us indulge in more surreptitious glances.

‘It's nice when they at least reach for their purse,' says Russ. ‘But I want my future wife to look back on our first date and think,
He was a gent
.'

I suppose I should be listening, taking notes now that I'm apparently single too, but contemplating life without Rebecca is like trying to imagine a new colour.

‘Beaked salmon?' says Russ.

I shake my head, and Tom explains to a confused-looking Jamie that Russ is trying to guess the name of the fish I apparently look like.

‘Don't tell me,' says Russ, as Jamie's mobile starts to ring. ‘I'll get it in a minute.'

Jamie steps away to answer his phone and Russ watches him with an admiring glint in his eye.

‘Maybe I should have drawn a picture of him and Jamie instead,' Tom whispers to me.

‘I heard that,' says Russ, glaring at us, but then his expression melts. ‘Actually, I think I'd like that. Maybe note it down for Christmas?'

The three of us laugh together but then no one says anything for a few seconds, and that's all I need to fall into another daydream.

I think what makes all this worse is that I didn't see any of it coming. Rebecca and I weren't slowly chugging to an end like a Walkman low on battery. Things were good, more than good, and then in an instant they weren't. More like an uncharged iPod cutting out abruptly midsong. I just wish she'd answer my calls, or reply to one of my messages, so we could at least see if we could recharge.

‘Blobfish!' says Russ excitedly.

‘Yes, that's it.'

‘I looked at your face just then and it came to me.'

I'm about to apologize, because it's his birthday and I know I'm being a drag, but Jamie interrupts.

‘That was Rebecca on the phone,' he says. ‘She's had an accident.'

‘What?' I put down my drink. ‘What kind of accident? Is she OK?'

I reach for my own phone but Jamie puts his hand on mine. ‘She's fine, mate. Just a sprained wrist and a bit shaken up, that's all.'

‘What did she say?' I ask, irked by his lack of urgency. ‘What happened?'

‘She had a fall during a site visit but, really, she's fine. I just thought you'd want to know.'

I hear him sigh and shout after me as I dart outside to call her, but it's all muffled, like I'm underwater, drowning in all the words I want to say to her.

‘FOR FUCK'S SAKE,' I scream when her phone goes to voicemail after one ring.

Only then do I realize I'm standing in a huge great puddle, surrounded by my own blurred reflection. And it hits me: I used to envy Rebecca's unsentimentality; wished I could be more like that, even. But now it's the very thing that's preventing us from sorting all this shit out.

‘Come on, Nicholls,' I hear Jamie say. He must have followed me out. ‘You're scaring off the customers.'

I let him usher me back inside, my shoes squishing against the floor, and I want to thank him, but I know that if I said even a single word the tears would start to fall.

‘My round,' declares Russ, zigzagging through a herd of bouncers and into the club.

I thought about going home, but there's nothing to distract me from the daydreams there, and when Russ argued that I needed to drown my sorrows, I figured it was worth a shot.

‘Three lagers and three sambuca chasers,' Russ tells a barman who is wearing a shiny gold shirt and a black afro wig. ‘Oh, and a coke for my friend whose girlfriend doesn't let him drink.'

‘It was my decision,' says Tom, but I reckon even he knows it's not a credible line of argument.

Jamie downs his chaser in one, so of course Russ follows suit. I think about tactically ditching mine but all eyes are on me, and there are sorrows to be drowned, so I close my eyes, swallow and slap the empty glass on to the bar top.

‘Nice hairdo, by the way,' says Jamie.

‘Thanks, buddy,' says Russ. ‘I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about why I'm single, and I decided it was my barber's fault.' He picks up his lager but doesn't drink any. ‘So I went somewhere new.'

Across the room the DJ adjusts his fake moustache as he jigs to Chic's ‘Le Freak'.

‘What
is
this place?' I ask.

I look to Russ for an answer but he's busy sniffing his armpits. Apparently content, he gestures to the dance floor. ‘Let's do this.'

He leads us to a spot that seems to be a thoroughfare for people needing the bog, and the bottoms of my trousers are wet from the puddle, and the speakers are so loud that I can't hear anyone speak, so I have to gauge from their expression whether to nod or laugh.

Russ dances like no one is watching, which has the effect of making everyone watch, or perhaps it's just the girls checking out Jamie. Tom, meanwhile, manages to dance without moving either his feet or his arms, like a tree swaying in the wind.

And me? I try to get into the spirit, I really do, but this drowning sorrows thing is total bollocks. You think you can drown them but it isn't long before they get wise to what you're doing, before they learn to swim. Right now my sorrows are Michael fucking Phelps.

I'm not sure how long I zone out for but the next thing I'm aware of is Tom stumbling forwards, barely managing to keep hold of his drink, and when I focus I see a fella about my height with a huge, open collar elbowing his way through the crowd. I feel a firm hand on my back, his hand, but he doesn't make eye contact or say excuse me before using his weight to try to bulldoze me out of the way.

I stand firm, and now his elbow connects with the middle of my spine, and in this moment all rational thought is overcome by this frustration inside me. I turn and position both hands on his chest, pushing him away with more force than I intended. A section of the dance floor clears as he stumbles backwards, but soon he's coming back at me.

‘Easy,' shouts Jamie, wrapping one arm around my chest and raising the other to halt the fella with the collar.

Through the glaze of alcohol I watch them eyeball one another until eventually the fella withdraws with a baleful stare.

‘Come on, mate. Let's have a break,' says Jamie, leading us from the dance floor.

We squeeze into a pew opposite the bar.

‘You were like fucking Batman down there,' I hear Russ say.

Jamie wafts his hand as if it was nothing. ‘Though if you do insist on comparing me to a superhero,' he says, ‘I think Spiderman is generally accepted as the best.'

‘I'm with Jamie,' says Tom. ‘I mean, even if you take all of Spiderman's superpowers away, he'd still be a genius.'

Russ nods like Tom has made a perfectly valid point, as he always does when Tom dares to proffer an opinion on anything relating to superheroes or comics, but in a second or two he'll embark on a diatribe that contradicts everything Tom has just said.

But then Jamie nods to agree with Tom, so of course Russ folds his arms and looks thoughtful for a few seconds. ‘And actually,' he concedes, ‘Spiderman was a hit with the ladies – Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, Kitty Pryde.'

Next, Russ wants to take a group selfie.

‘Could you smile, please?' he cries when I don't display the requisite enthusiasm. ‘It's like being on a night out with Morrissey.'

Russ examines his retaken photo while Jamie tells Tom about a contact he's got at a gallery in Covent Garden. I'm wondering if any of them would notice if I tried to make a French exit when I feel a body insert itself into the tiny column of free space beside me.

‘Sorry,' says a woman in a green dress, glancing at our touching thighs with a smile. ‘I'm Natalie.'

Her accent brings to mind haystacks and tractors, and is the kind you instinctively want to impersonate.

‘Ben,' I say.

I smile politely before turning back to Russ, but he's walking off towards the toilets, and Jamie and Tom are still deep in conversation, and I don't really know where to look as the DJ lowers the music to say something, so I study the rim of my glass.

‘You know a club is rubbish when the DJ talks on his microphone in between songs,' I hear Natalie say.

I laugh, then check the time on my phone.

‘Am I keeping you up?' says Natalie, her lips twitching mirthfully.

‘No, God, sorry,' I say.

Natalie picks up her something and coke, pinching the straw between her forefinger and thumb and bringing it to her frosty pink lips. I watch the liquid rise up into her mouth. Even though my heart isn't in it I feel obliged to say something. ‘Where is your accent from?'

‘Weymouth,' she says, placing a finger behind her right lobe. ‘Is this Boney M.?'

‘That's where the Black Death started – Weymouth.'

Natalie looks vaguely startled. ‘Well, I never knew that.'

I watch her finish her drink, noting that the flush in her cheeks is the product of make-up. It occurs to me that she would look prettier without, but that's one of those comments that is never taken the way it's intended.

‘To be fair,' she says, knocking my shin with her foot while crossing her legs, ‘I think I might prefer the Black Death to a night in here.'

‘Good point, well made.'

When I turn to the others Russ is back, and he's pointing to his phone and smirking at me, but I've got no idea what he's on about.

‘We're going to dance again,' says Jamie. ‘You coming?'

I lean into him. ‘I might head home in a bit.'

I don't hear his reply so I try to read his expression and decide to answer with
Cool
. He gives me a quizzical look before following Russ and Tom to the dance floor.

‘I don't know about you,' says Natalie, standing up, ‘but I need another drink if I'm going to stick around.'

I go to tell her what I told Jamie, about heading home, but she is presenting her hand so that I have little choice but to accept it and follow her to the bar.

Our eyes meet as we clink our fresh drinks, and I'm not sure how, but suddenly it's like we're competing in a game of stare, and somehow, for the first time in weeks, I'm present, in the moment.

I cling to the feeling, the release from thinking about Rebecca, and it takes me all the way back to Natalie's place, and although she doesn't know it, I'm still playing the game of stare, because I can just about do this, stay in the moment, enjoy it even, as long as I don't close my eyes . . .

. . . I snap them open, expelling Rebecca's image from my mind, pulling away momentarily and then directing my lips across Natalie's jaw and down to her neck, keeping my eyes wide as she twists from underneath me. She shuffles out of her tight jeans and pants and hooks her legs over my hips.

I try to swallow down a queasiness ascending my throat. I've always thought that sleeping with a woman is like getting the Tube. The first time you've got absolutely no idea where you're going, and the map bears no resemblance to what London actually looks like. It is only when you've made a few journeys that it becomes second nature. Like with Rebecca, I know which lines to take, the quickest routes, the nicest spots to end up. But this, here in Natalie's bedroom, feels unfamiliar, and there is an excitement in that, in having this unfamiliar body saddled on my lap, but I need to stop closing my eyes . . .

A seed of guilt sprouts inside of me. What if Rebecca and I make up and she asks if I've been with anyone else?

Natalie's hands proceed towards the top button of my trousers, which she unfastens with a single, adroit flick, and now it is
her
lips kissing
my
neck, and I'm having to concentrate really hard on keeping my eyes open. I'm aware of a pool of sweat forming on my forehead, and her right hand is flat against my chest, and her left is—

‘Are you OK?' she says.

When I don't answer she drops into the open space beside me, our journey halted by unplanned engineering works.

‘It must be the sambucas,' I finally say.

‘Perhaps.'

Her
perhaps
isn't followed by a full stop; it's a
perhaps
with an ellipsis, a
perhaps
that I'm supposed to wonder the meaning of.

‘Perhaps?' I say, accidentally impersonating her West Country accent.

Natalie folds her knees into her chest and wraps her arms around them. ‘I think I've worked it out.'

‘Worked what out?'

‘You've got a girlfriend, right?'

I sit up. ‘I told you, it's the drink.'

‘Oh, it's not just
that
,' she says, directing a finger at my groin. ‘That happens more than you think.'

‘What then?'

‘Well, for starters it feels like you're in a parallel universe.' She starts to count points on her fingers. ‘Like, you don't shut your eyes when we kiss, which is a bit strange.'

‘I just—'

‘Then at one point I thought you might be about to cry.' I go to argue but Natalie talks over me. ‘And then you keep checking your phone.'

‘I could have been waiting for an important call.'

‘At five past midnight on a Friday?'

I pull the covers over my chest, cold. ‘Go on, Miss Marple . . .'